One of the most prominent scientific journals in the UK, The Lancet, is entering the drug policy debate and potentially trying to revise the way that nation’s current laws are formulated. The proposal is to index drugs according to their actual danger.

The rating process polled two groups of scientists and took into account legal as well as illicit drugs. To no one’s surprise, alcohol was ranked third and fifth most dangerous on the two lists. Cannabis was rated 11th & 12th (Ecstasy was rated 11th on one and didn’t make the top 14 on the other).

The first ranking was undertaken by the national group of consultant psychiatrists who were on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ register as specialists in addiction. The second group of experts represented a wider spread of expertise, with experience in one of the many areas of addiction, ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services.

The findings and suggestions in “Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse,” by Prof. David Nutt and an academic team from Bristol, Oxford and London, were published in The Lancet, March 24, 2007.

“There are three main factors that together determine the harm associated with any drug of potential abuse: the physical harm to the individual user caused by the drug; the tendency of the drug to induce dependence; and the effect of drug use on families, communities, and society,” the researchers determined.

Given the addictionist-heavy makeup of the base, it is conservative in its approach, such as reliance upon “possible lung disease with cannabis” when there is little proven detriment

“So, if a three-category classification were to be retained, one possible interpretation of our findings is that drugs with harm scores equal to that of alcohol and above might be class A, cannabis and those below might be class C, and drugs in between might be class B. In that case, it is salutary to see that alcohol and tobacco-the most widely used unclassified substances-would have harm ratings comparable with class A and B illegal drugs, respectively.”

    Rankings by two independent groups of experts